My Role

Role: Product Designer
Timeline: 6 months
Deliverables: User research, UX design and visual design.

The Design Process

To kick off my first ever project, I started by doing primary and secondary research. I then organized my notes using affinity and empathy maps. I distilled my target users and product goals through personas and user stories. Then I worked on the information architecture where I created site maps and user flows. Once the information architecture and user flows were solidified, I moved into sketching. From those sketches, I designed low-fidelity and high-fidelity wireframes while conducting usability tests along the way. Finally, I polished it off with thoughtful and intentional visual design. For my end result, I provided an interactive clickable prototype incorporating all the work I did following this process.

User Interviews

In order to begin my primary research, I first sent out a screener survey. I received 35 respondents. From those responses, I was looking for people who had a variety of subscriptions and watched TV often. Additionally, I wanted to interview some people who usually repeated content and some who always watched something new. I selected five people of varying ages and genders so I could better understand four key questions:

1. What motivates someone to interact with video streaming services?
   
2. What factors influence their decisions when picking a title to watch?
3. Where are the major pain points that ultimately disengage a user?
4. Why is a familiar title more comfortable than picking something new?

User Personas

I created three empathy maps to better identify the three different types of user personas I found emerging from the research. The key differentiator between the three types of users is their level of engagement with the television. Are they actively engaged, passively engaged, or somewhere in the middle?

• Actively Engaged TV Buff
• Stays on top of trends
• Always watches new content. Rarely repeat watches
• Has an extensive watchlist
• Turns on the TV with intent to watch a specific program
• Wants very personalized recommendations to cut down on search time

• Flexible Mood Based Watcher
• Tired? They’ll watch something mindless that they’ve already seen before.
• Feeling engaged? They’ll find something new to get into.
• Want suggestions based on their mood, especially for new content

• White Noise TV Watcher
• Always watches repeatable content (usually something they've seen before)
• Need background noise to focus on other tasks
• Want suggestions based on binge-ability

Sketching

I took my flows and put them in hand-drawn paper interfaces. I took these sketches and put them in Figma to create a very low-fi clickable prototype that I then guerilla tested with five users. I wanted to see how users moved through a quiz that asked them simple questions in order to produce content suggestions. I discovered that users found it confusing for the app to ask what streaming services they subscribed to but then show potential watch options that may not be available with what they already pay for. I also discovered that asking people what mood they are in is incredibly subjective but presenting them with options versus asking them to type something in is less work for them and helps them find the descriptor they are looking for.

High Fidelity Wireframes

After coming up with a solid idea of how the screens would work and look, I created my high-fidelity wireframes and tested again. In these iterations, I continued to work on the quiz results presentation. I also worked to better emphasize a few of the app’s key features, like the “why this match” overlay and “group watch” functionality. At first, users weren’t very interested in the features but through better emphasized iconography, users engaged with those areas more.

Solutions

To best serve the users, I created a UX that simplifies the decision making process and gives them the best options based on their interests and viewing habits.